National Bicycling Day aka Yom Kippur

The main reason why I like to stay in Israel during the High Holidays is Yom Kippur. When we got back to Israel after spending many years in the US, I was delighted to discover that Yom Kippur was no longer the dreary holiday of my childhood, it has totally changed and gained a uniquely Israeli interpretation as a  national bicycling day.

That year, about two weeks before the High Holidays, our daughters informed us that they absolutely had to have bicycles for Yom Kippur, all their friends had them. That is how we first learnt about the new tradition.

Imagine a big city where on a regular day the streets are packed with noisy cars and buses, and then all of a sudden, as though by magic -- everything comes to a halt and there is silence.

Earlier today I checked and saw  that on this year Yom Kippur in Tel Aviv starts  shortly before 6 pm. When I got on my bike around that time there were still some cars. But few minutes later everything stopped. While riding I saw families in white walking toward the synagogue, and some very well dressed young children with their parents on tricycles, and scooters.

When I rode back the busy Hatayasim highway was totally empty of cars and filled with older children on their bicycles. Later tonight I expect to see the streets become even fuller with people, this is the night when everybody goes outside.

Tomorrow, like most Tel Avivians,  we will ride our bicycles, in previous years we headed to the sea and rode along the shore before finally arriving to Hayarkon river and then back home. It is literally a once in a year experience. For me this is also the only day that I feel confident enough to ride on the roads and don’t have to worry about being run over by a car.

I don’t know who invented Bicycling Day and whether  s/he works in the bicycling business, but she is clearly a genius. Naturally every year before Yom Kippur the sales of bicycles increase tremendously.

Probably for many Orthodox Jews the practice of observing the holiest day of the year has not changed much throughout the years, but for me as a secular Jew the holiday has become meaningful once it stopped belonging only to Orthodox Jews. As a child every Yom Kippur we hid at home and I remember my mother asking us to eat quietly and not to make noise because the neighbors were passing by our kitchen window on their way back from Shul.

Bicycling has changed all that, Yom Kippur stopped being a holiday that had nothing to do with me or my life style and became a favorite holiday, one which I could enjoy as an Israeli, if not as an observant Jew.

On that same Yom Kippur when we returned to Israel we were walking  at night behind our two cycling daughters. Dizengof street was quiet and there were no cars. All of a sudden an old and noisy Volkswagen beetle came toward us with all its windows open. We saw that the driver of that car was the poet David Avidan.

It never occurred to me before, but perhaps Avidan did not realize that Yom Kippur has changed and wanted to protest. As one of the greatest  poets of secularization I believe that he would have loved the new Israeli holiday of Bicycling Day.

The essay appeared at the Times Of Israel

http://blogs.timesofisrael.com/national-bicycling-day-aka-yom-kippur/

Kindness Of Strangers": A Different Holiday

 When we were in the US, we always dreamt about going back to Israel so that our daughters would grow up there. When they were in second and first grade respectively it finally happened. My husband got a position in Ben Gurion University in the southern city of Beer Sheva, and I got a job teaching English in a public high school.

 We arrived to Beer Sheva late in August few days prior to the start of the school year. Our daughters spoke Hebrew, but they needed extra help with their reading and writing.

I started teaching at the high school, but as I have never taught before, I was not at all ready for what  happened in class. Instead of teaching my students the wonders of the English language, like I had planned, the noise in the class forced me to constantly discipline them. I had no experience and had no idea on how to make the students sit quietly and  listen to me, and as a result I could not engage them. I felt uprepared and  helpless.

 At the end of an especially exhausting day, some ten days after the beginning of the year, I realized  that I was not up to the job. Moreover, I felt  that I would not have the needed energy to help my own girls with their  Hebrew if I kept on struggling with the students to teach them  English.  When my husband came home that afternoon I told him that I decided to quit, he understood.

 I went down to the public phone to call my supervisor;  it was simply not done to quit after the beginning of the year, and I expected  that she would be furious with me. But instead she listened and said that she understood, she told me that she would come to visit me the following day.

 When she came over she was most sympathetic and  shared with me the  difficulties she encountered after she immigrated to Israel some fifteen years  earlier. She arrived here as a young woman and started teaching right away, it was hard but she got used to it.

Like her, we were young when we moved to tohe US and faced some challenges in our new country, but we too managed. However, moving back home we were sure that since we knew the place it would be easy and familiar to adapt to Israel again. My failure as a teacher came as a shock.

As it was several days before the High Holidays, my new friend invited our family to her home for dinner. Our families got along well and it was a beginning of a lifelong friendship. Although in quitting my job at the  high school, I obviously created a problem, she recommended me for another job. About  two months later when we wanted to buy a house, she and her husband had known, even before we did,  that we needed  someone to cosign for the mortgage loan. At a great financial risk if we defaulted on the loan, they offered their help and cosigned our loan.

 Although this is not a Christmas story, the kindness of my former boss is surely in the spirit of the season. We were strangers, but she and her husband were never suspicious toward us, quite the contrary: they were generous and made us welcome.  This experience has changed not only our reality at the time, but it also affected the way we viewed the world: it inspired us to become more accepting and in a way made us better people.

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